THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ VI

Whittier Daily News



Americans suffer more than 14,000 casualties in Iraq

Between 14,000 and 22,000 military men and women have been medically evacuated from Iraq


By David H. Hackworth



Tuesday, December 30, 2003 - ALMOST daily we're told that another American soldier has sacrificed life or limb in Iraq. For way too many of us unless we have a white flag with a blue star in our window these casualty reports have become as big a yawn as a TV forecast of the weather in Baghdad.

Even I and I deal with that beleaguered land seven days a week was staggered when a Pentagon source gave me a copy of a Nov. 30 dispatch showing that since George W. Bush unleashed the dogs of war, our armed forces have taken 14,000 casualties in Iraq about the number of warriors in a line tank division.

We have the equivalent of five combat divisions plus support for a total of about 135,000 troops deployed in the Iraqi theater of operations, which means we've lost the equivalent of a fighting division since March. At least 10 percent of the total number of Joes and Jills available to the theater commander to fight or support the occupation effort has been evacuated back to the United States!

Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross of the U.S. military's Transportation Command told me that as of Dec. 23, his outfit had evacuated 3,255 battle-injured casualties and 18,717 non-battle injuries.

Of the battle casualties, 473 died and 3,255 were wounded by hostile fire.

Following are the major categories of the non-battle evacuations:

Orthopedic surgery 3,907

General surgery 1,995

Internal medicine 1,291

Psychiatric 1,167

Neurology 1,002

Gynecological 491

Sources say that most of the gynecological evacuations are pregnancy-related, although the exact figure can't be confirmed Pentagon pregnancy counts are kept closer to the vest than the number of nuke warheads in the U.S. arsenal.

Ross cautioned that his total of 21,972 evacuees could be higher than other reports because "in some cases, the same service member may be counted more than once.'

The Pentagon has never won prizes for the accuracy of its reporting, but I think it's safe to say that so far somewhere between 14,000 and 22,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have been medically evacuated from Iraq to the U.S.

So at the end of this turbulent year, we must ask ourselves: Was the price our warriors paid in blood worth the outcome? Are we any safer than before our pre-emptive invasion?

Even though Saddam is in the slammer and the fourth-largest army in the world is junkyard scrap, Christmas 2003 was resolutely Orange, and 2004 looks like more of the same. Or worse.

Our first New Year's resolution should be to find out if the stated reasons for our pre-emptive strike Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's connection with al- Qaida constituted a real threat to our national security. Because, contrary to public opinion, the present administration hasn't yet made the case that Saddam and his sadists aided and abetted al-Qaida's attacks on 9/11. We also need to know why our $30 billion-a-year intelligence agencies didn't read the tea leaves correctly, as well as what's being done besides upgrading the color code to prevent other similar strikes.

Congress should get with the program and lift a page from the U.S. Army handbook on how to learn from a military operation. When an Army-training or actual-combat op is concluded, all the key players assemble for an honest, no-holds-barred critique of everything that's gone down the good, the bad and the ugly. Some of the participants might walk away black and blue, but everyone learns from the mistakes.

Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and retired Gen. Tommy Franks should be required to report to a congressional committee convened to investigate both the invasion and the planning or lack of planning for the occupation of Iraq. This committee must operate without the political skulduggery that occurred during the numerous investigations into the Pearl Harbor catastrophe when high-level malfeasance that cost thousands of lives and put America's national security in extreme jeopardy was repeatedly covered up for more than 50 years.

Our Iraqi casualties deserve nothing less than the unvarnished truth. Only then will their sacrifices not have been in vain. And only then can we all move on with the enlightenment we need to protect and preserve our precious country's future.



Contact syndicated columnist David Hackworth through his Web site at www.hackworth.com .

Gels, That's a nice piece by Hackworth, but means very little to over the fifty percent of Americans that supports this president and administration. While the democrats belittle their own, they do nothing about what Hackworth talks about; finding out the truth about this administration's justification for going to war with Iraq. Nothing else matters.

In other words, we have found the chumps, and they are us! How discouraging.

But investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen -- combining pox virus and snake venom -- that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a "grave and gathering danger" by President Bush and a "mortal threat" by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.

A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

David Kay, who directs the weapons hunt on behalf of the Bush administration, reported no discoveries last year of finished weapons, bulk agents or ready-to-start production lines. Members of his Iraq Survey Group, in unauthorized interviews, said the group holds out little prospect now of such a find. Kay and his spokesman, who report to Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, declined to be interviewed.

Those documents were an Immenent threat to the American people, damnit!!!

The USA liberated Iraq so that the Iraqi people can enjoy democracy. If they don't chose the democracy that the USA says it should then the USA will make them do so by whatever means it takes no matter how long it takes.

To the wounded and to the dead soldiers families. Your sons and daughters fought to protect America and to protect the world for Freedom and Democracy.